Denise's Blueberry Patch

Grace to Serve

Foreign missions is not only about being there for the nationals; it’s about being there for others who serve on the field too! Yesterday we said goodbye to the last two of our house guests, Micah (23) and Hannah (18), MK’s from neighboring Russia. They had to stay an extra week waiting for their visas; while they were here, we got dumped on royally with tons of snow, the likes of which I’ve not seen since I was a little girl, in the 1970’s in Minnesota. It began on Matt's birthday, November 21st, and is still coming down as I write this, November 25th. Rain is predicted in two days. Crazy!

Since we recently returned from a month-long stay in the US, and ourselves had to depend upon the hospitality of others, I had a laundry list of hosting to-do’s and  “what-not-to-do”’s fresh in my memory, little creature comforts that make a stay in someone else’s home, well, comfortable. So when, upon our return, we were asked to host a missionary family, I stepped into the role of hostess with my whole heart, taking my cue from Matt’s email reply to the family's father, who requested we take care of his wife and children for a few weeks. My  husband, bless him, had simply replied, “We look forward to serving you.” Serve? Was that the right choice of word, honey? You mean they won’t be making the meals or cleaning the house? I may have gulped; but I appreciated Matt’s leadership, and knew it to be the appropriate and godly response.

What an opportunity to practice such things as love for the brethren (I John 3:14), a Christ like servant’s heart (Acts 20:19), and hospitality (Romans 12:13, Timothy 3:2, Titus 1:8, I Peter 4:9)! It’s been on my mind and heart these past many months to increase in my love for people, and I don’t know about you, but once I set out to do something requiring supernatural assistance, God takes me up on the offer right away. So a family of four is coming to stay?! Sure! I’ll just put my finger on the pause button of my life, no problem! 

Scripture is clear about how we are to serve. All the applicable verses don't indicate there are any gray areas, "special circumstances" where we can wiggle out of serving, maybe to people I don’t agree with, perhaps, or to people who take advantage of me, or who aren’t grateful. My guidebook, the Bible, God’s loving book of letters to me, clearly says those that are His are to love hospitality, be given to it, to love to serve regardless, and to do so for the Lord, not for the praise of man. I go on to read that we are to love our spiritual family so much we would be willing to die for them (I John 3:16). Wow. Okay, Lord, it doesn’t sound like such a sacrifice to cook and clean for a few weeks, in that context. We cleaned, went food shopping, and moved furniture around in anticipation of the additional family members.

Well, about 2 weeks in, during which I planned and prepared food for six people twice a day, and kept up with the cleaning and laundry and toddler care, I was getting physically, and mentally, worn out. The inability to pay greater attention to our personal affairs and ministry responsibilities started to bother me. Any distant dream I ever entertained of running my own B&B in retirement faded completely, and if anyone EVER expresses to me it is their dream, I will promptly list a zillion reasons why I highly discourage it. There is absolutely nothing romantic or exciting about being a maid and cook night and day! That purposeful frame of mind to serve others, which I started out so joyfully engaged in, was turning me into a ....servant, a maid! A chief cook and bottle washer is still...cook and bottle washer.

It sounds really good, both in the spiritual and physical realm, to say you are practicing servant leadership. But the reality is that it is grunge work. No one would have looked at me, laboring in the kitchen, and thought, “Poor girl, doing all this work.” It would more likely be "What's she working so hard for?" Jesus washed the feet of his apostles, and onlookers thought it was a little crazy. Just last month, my sisters and sister in law, and my mother, all played host to my family, and even though I was appreciative, I never gave their labors on my behalf a second thought.

While in my own kitchen, laboring away, my attitude began to spiral downwards as I let my weary feelings dictate my thoughts. Of course my pride would not allow me to say, “Get in the kitchen and make your own meals!” or “Do your own dishes!” Hosts don’t do that.  I prayed for grace to continue to serve. I needed God’s enabling grace!

His Amazing Grace. It’s what saves us in the first place, when we first believe. It has nothing to do with me, or anything I have or haven't done. He did it all, past tense, on the cross. He continues to give grace, present tense, for the journey. It was apparent to me that I had gotten off-track in my serving. I had started doing it in my own strength, and for myself. I mean, who doesn’t want to be thanked after a splendid meal of pork roast, home baked bread, roasted paprika potatoes and ginger carrot salad, and for dessert, chewy gooey brownies? But that attitude is so totally out of whack with what gracious hospitality is, in God's eyes. A servant serves, not for personal gain or praise, but for the pure joy of serving.

Well, my expectations got straightened out. I serve God Almighty, high on his throne in heaven and in my heart. He will have a few things to say to me on Judgment Day about that meal, and a zillion other meals, and it won’t be good for me if my heart wasn’t pure. I got back behind the kitchen sink upon my return, confident in the joy that I was serving my God, not man. I was no longer waiting for praise or thanks, or an equal exchange of labor, and that was a relief. God was watching my heart, and that is what I needed to keep pure before him.  He wanted me to care for this family, and I was not to question that reason, nor give him trouble for filling my house, his house, with guests. 

It all has a happy ending. We thoroughly enjoyed observing the relationships of a more established missionary family, and we made eternal friends.  I learned some new “quickie” recipes, as my problem is that I cannot just ‘throw’ a meal together. I have to do it old-school, meaning my meatballs simmer for hours in a fresh garlic tomato sauce, and my bread is from scratch. It's okay to serve Cheerios for dinner, if that's all you have, or are capable of serving. We were left with a generous gift to cover expenses, can look back without shame at anything we said or did, and will certainly reflect on this time in our lives as very special. There were a few hours Sunday evening when the snow was falling thickly and the roads were so hazardous that I doubted our guests would be able to leave, but the Lord mercifully decided to reunite them with their parents in time for Thanksgiving. It truly was a privilege to serve this precious family for the short time we were able to, and I am grateful to them for putting up with me as I grew in grace!

By the way, it's c-c-c-c-cold here! 

An Afternoon Adventure

After lunch on Friday we got the phone call that the letters of invitation from Moscow for two of our houseguests had arrived. Matt had ordered a load of gravel for the driveway and couldn’t leave. Kathy, the mother of the children who’s visa applications still hadn’t been submitted after a whole week of staying with us, would have to drive. She had never driven in Tallinn, and I had never been behind the wheel in Tallinn. It was a tense few minutes as we scurried to grab our pocketbooks, get our shoes and jackets on, and bark out last-minute instructions for Hannah, the teenaged daughter who would stay behind with Olivia. In my last minute panic looking for the car’s documents, I tracked mud from outside back into the house, up the stairs and onto our bedroom’s white carpet.

The morning had been spent trying to research where a visa could be processed in 3 days, as the standard is 10 days. A travel agent in Latvia wanted $700, which basically means it’s illegal and she has a contact at the Russian embassy that will do it for a price. The travel agent in England said he could only do UK resident applications in 3 days. The other option was to send them to Washington, DC for 1-day service. Or, they could just stay in Tallinn for another 10 days and pay the $300. Kathy opted for the DHL office and overnight service to Washington. I had my doubts. Rushing around to beat time never has been a profitable endeavor in my experience. And it was Friday afternoon, mind you. One of Murphy’s laws came to mind: If something can go wrong, it will. For one, I had a carpet to clean when I got back.

As she drove I navigated to the best of my memory, not having the forethought to bring a map, and she tried to stay calm with the traffic buzzing past and in front of us. Our plan was to pick up the invitations that had been overnighted from Moscow to our friend’s apartment, and drive to the DHL office in the city center. We took the long way around to our friend’s house, opting to stay on one road that circumvents Tallinn, rather than navigate through it.

Upon arriving at our friend’s, the head of the house (hint: man) was keenly interested in why I didn’t choose the more direct, simple route of going through the city. It was easier for me, I said, to stay on one road, but he didn’t buy it. He knew of a much better route. It went this way and that-a-way, and was much shorter. Men are in a constant state of competition. They need to do things better and faster. They will compete against their own self, and try to beat their own personal record. That’s just the way God made them. He pulled out the map to show me my error. Yes, my way was longer. His way was shorter. There is a Russian saying, though, that the shortest way is the way the driver knows.  I should have said that. But I didn’t, because I only just thought of it.

So I asked for directions to DHL. But my friend first gave me directions to my house from his house, still compelling me to take his way! He eventually got to finding the DHL address for me, but by that time it was getting rather cloudy in my head. I have always been a visual learner. If someone said, go north at the stop sign, like they say in Minnesota, my mind paints the picture of the sun setting on my left, and right-sided shadows on the trees or signpost. It is not easy for me to compute directional instructions involving a succession of turns and stops, because I am busy painting a masterpiece of colors and objects in my head. Tallinn, especially on this day, was gray and gloomy. We were hunkered down in a musty Audi with windows coated in fog and smog residue. Everything was coming up gray in the painting in my head.

There is a trick to starting our 10+-year-old Audi, a mysterious ritual involving the thumb, steering wheel, clutch and foot, and waving the keys at an unseen eye located in the consul, in the vicinity between the right knee and calve. More specifically, you have to press the left corner of the horn on the wheel with your left thumb, hold the clutch in with your foot (if the car is in gear), and then with your right hand wave the keys in front of the invisible beam down near your right knee. Then you let go of the horn and turn the ignition. First Kathy tried to do the unlocking ritual, then I did, to no avail. By the time I called upstairs to have our friend’s husband come down to help, I was on the verge of hysteria with laughter. When we were finally buckled up and the car was running, the directions had gone completely out of my head. I had to admit to Kathy, “ I have no idea where we are going.”

Tallinn is not a large metropolis, though, and we got to our destination, DHL, on a wing and a prayer. After a 45-minute wait spent filling out papers, letting other people in line go, finding out it was the girl-behind-the-counter’s first day on the job, that she did speak Russian but not English, and finally getting the price for all the shipping and paperwork, it was decided to NOT send the paperwork and passports to the US. The $500+ price tag was just not worth the extra days saved. It was around 5:00 PM, giving us an hour to get to the travel agent who was handling the other visas. I sat in the car for the next hour while Kathy took care of her paperwork, wishing I had brought something to do or read, but using the time to pray and people watch.

We stopped for gas on the way home, with minor incidental mistakes of pulling in on the wrong side of the pump and someone stealing our place while we were turning around, dropping the gas cover and having to get on our hands and knees to get it out from under the car where it had rolled. Then we ordered 15 cheeseburgers at McDonald’s drive-through to bring home to the boys, and the teenaged clerk was more than a little baffled, repeating the number 15 in English, Russian and Estonian, confirming with flashing five fingers three times, which resulted in another clerk helping him. They were giggling uncontrollably, who knows what they found funny about the situation, two middle-aged American women ordering 15 cheeseburgers, unless they thought we were going to eat them, which is what we thought they thought, and then we started laughing. That would be funny!

Rugelach and a bit about Noah

Our house is full of guests for a couple of weeks, so my job is to stay in the kitchen and feed the troops. If I’m not planning the next meal, I’m cleaning up after the last one. It’s been a workout! Olivia loves the extra company, although two are teens and have been trying hard to keep up with their homework. If their noses aren’t in a book, they are catching up with friends and family on Facebook and Skype, as they live in Moscow and are still on dial-up. Olivia isn’t easily deterred, however, and I often need to pluck her out of their midst. Today I had to blockade the kitchen with her in it, and keep her occupied with counting my seed collection, sticking toothpicks into Cheerios, and blowing bubbles with dish soap just to give the kids a break.

So, it was a no-brainer to keep going with the baking and complete this week’s TWD challenge: rugelach. After all the breads and cookies I’ve been putting out lately, these twisted little treats were awesome. I am even going to share the recipe, since NPR has it posted on their site here from an interview with Dorie Greenspan back in 2006 (HINT: these would be great for the upcoming holiday season). They are easy, and delicious!

My experience with rugelach is limited: when I worked as a nanny in Boston in the early 1990’s, I’d walk to a little Jewish bakery in the neighborhood with my young charge Abe in tow, and buy both of us a bagful of cinnamon-raisin rugelach. It never occurred to me to make it, as Jewish foods were as mysterious to me as learning Hebrew; never mind the fact I was more focused on learning Italian cooking at the time. But today, I wondered just what the history of rugelach was. Two hours after googling the initial word, I was still reading into the wee hours of the morning, absorbed in the fascinating history of this one line of Jewish'ness'.

The pastry appears to be credited to the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern and Central Europe. The Ashkenazim are essentially German Jews, and comprise nearly 80% of the world’s Jewish population. 6 of the 7 million Jews in the US are considered Ashkenazim, even though the definition may be a loose one. It’s not completely clear if the word Ashkenaz in Hebrew tradition and literature means the Jews in Germany or --and this is where it gets cool-- the descendants of Noah in Armenia. Read Genesis 10:1-3, and you will notice Ashkenaz was the great-grandson of Noah, grandson of Japheth, and son of Gomer; their descendants settled in Armenia. I’m nearly certain they weren’t twisting pastry back then, and they most certainly didn’t have cream cheese, but somewhere in that lineage emerged a star baker, possibly after a contingent moved to the Rhine in Germany, close to the world's pastry capital of France. It’s not hard to imagine, when among Japheth’s descendents are Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, George Gershwin and Isaac Asimov, not to mention a majority of Nobel peace prize winners; the average IQ of an Ashkenazi is 113 (reference: wiki). Soooooo.....I'm thinking a wild thought: is rugelach really a disguise for brain food??

Dorie Greenspan's Rugelach

For the Dough
4 ounces cold cream cheese, cut into 4 pieces
1 stick (8 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

For the Glaze
1 large egg
1 teaspoon cold water
2 tablespoons sugar, preferably decorating (coarse) sugar

For the Filling
2/3 cup raspberry jam, apricot jam or marmalade
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 cup chopped nuts (I prefer pecans, but you can use walnuts or almonds)
1/4 cup plump, moist dried currants
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped, or 2/3 cup store-bought mini chocolate chips

TO MAKE THE DOUGH: Let the cream cheese and butter rest on the counter for 10 minutes - you want them to be slightly softened but still cool. Put the flour and salt in a food processor, scatter over the chunks of cream cheese and butter and pulse the machine 6 to 10 times. Then process, scraping down the sides of the bowl often, just until the dough forms large curds - don't work it so long that it forms a ball on the blade. Turn the dough out, gather it into a ball and divide it in half. Shape each half into a disk, wrap the disks in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or up to 1 day. (Wrapped airtight, the dough can be frozen for up to 2 months.)

TO MAKE THE FILLING: Heat the jam in a saucepan over low heat, or do this in a microwave, until it liquefies. Mix the sugar and cinnamon together. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats. (Silicone baking mats are great for rugelach.)

TO SHAPE THE COOKIES: Pull one packet of dough from the refrigerator. If it is too firm to roll easily, either leave it on the counter for about 10 minutes or give it a few bashes with your rolling pin. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into an 11- to 12-inch circle. Spoon (or brush) a thin gloss of jam over the dough, and sprinkle over half of the cinnamon sugar. Scatter over half of the nuts, half of the currants and half of the chopped chocolate. Cover the filling with a piece of wax paper and gently press the filling into the dough, then remove the paper and save it for the next batch. Using a pizza wheel or a sharp knife, cut the dough into 16 wedges, or triangles. (The easiest way to do this is to cut the dough into quarters, then to cut each quarter into 4 triangles.) Starting at the base of each triangle, roll the dough up so that each cookie becomes a little crescent. Arrange the roll-ups on one baking sheet, making sure the points are tucked under the cookies, and refrigerate. Repeat with the second packet of dough, and refrigerate the cookies for at least 30 minutes before baking. (The cookies can be covered and refrigerated overnight or frozen for up to 2 months; don't defrost before baking, just add a couple of minutes to the baking time.) Makes 32 cookies

GETTING READY TO BAKE: Position the racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

TO GLAZE: Stir the egg and water together, and brush a bit of this glaze over each rugelach. Sprinkle the cookies with the sugar. Bake the cookies for 20 to 25 minutes, rotating the sheets from top to bottom and front to back at the midway point, until they are puffed and golden. Transfer the cookies to racks to cool to just warm or to room temperature.

SERVING: Tea is traditional, but we drink coffee with rugelach. These are pretty and, even with their jam-and-fruit filling, not overly sweet, and they are even good with sparkling wine. STORING: The cookies can be kept covered at room temperature for up to 3 days or wrapped airtight and frozen for up to 2 months.